Chet Gresham

Targets and Touches

Week 9 Target Watch: NFC

Welcome to the NFC targets and touches for Week 9 of the NFL season. The AFC portion will be up tomorrow night, so mark your calendars.

This week since I had a little more time due to the byes I’ve added a few wrinkles to the target stats. I have all the targets for each player since Week 2, and then in parentheses I have the total targets for the year followed by another parenthesized number, which is the average targets per game played for that player. Then below that I have the Red Zone targets and touches for each player. The wrinkle I added there was instead of just targets I’m given you both targets and rushing attempts. That allows us to see how many times a player was given an opportunity to have the ball inside the opponent’s 20 yard line. So of course the running backs will have larger numbers there. And if anything is confusing hit me up on twitter or in the comments and I will happily explain.

Editor's Note: Rotoworld's partner FanDuel is hosting a one-week $300,000 Fantasy Football league for Week 9. It's $25 to join and first prize is $25,000. Starts Sunday at 1pm ET. Here's the link.

It’s odd to say, but the Cardinals didn’t need to do much after halftime because they had the game in hand, but before then Andre Ellington, Larry Fitzgerald and Michael Floyd all scored touchdowns. Carson Palmer only needed 13-of-18 completions for 172 yards and two touchdowns so there weren’t many targets and yards to go around for the receivers, especially the secondary receivers.

With Rashard Mendenhall out of the lineup with a toe injury, Andre Ellington went off for 154 rushing yards on just 15 carries. He had an 80 yard touchdown run, so of course his yards per carry is insane, but even if you take away that carry he had 76 yards on 14 carries, so the guy was getting it done on every carry. He was the lead back and was in on 63% of the snaps. He’s been around 45% over the last three games. His 17 total touches was his season high with 11 and 12 being his previous highs in Week 5 and 6.

The Cardinals haven’t been in the red zone all that often this season so we have a bit of a scatter shot look at their usage, but it does look like Ellington and Larry Fitzgerald have been getting the most looks down there of late and that’s the way it should be.

Harry Douglas had a huge 18-target game and most of those targets along with his production came in garbage-time. Drew Davis had a good garbage-time game catching five of seven targets for 77 yards and a touchdown and rookie Darius Johnson saw the second most targets with nine.

Steven Jackson did not look good in his first game back from his hamstring injury and I am being kind there. He saw 51 snaps to Jacquizz Rodgers’ 39. We’ll have to see if he looks better next week, but he has a tough game against the Panthers.

Tony Gonzalez was actually seeing more red zone looks before Roddy White and Julio Jones both went down. Now that he is the focus of the defense he is having a lot of trouble getting open and he sees even more defensive attention in the red zone.

The Panthers destroyed the Buccaneers last Thursday night without really breaking a sweat. Cam Newton has now run an average of 10 times per game over his last three games and the Panthers have won each game by an average of 19 points. Mike Shula has given Newton more designed runs and in turn has made their best player the focal point of the offense once again.

DeAngelo Williams leads the team in red zone touches, but inside the five-yard line Mike Tolbert leads with eight touches to two for Williams. With Johnathan Stewart coming back at some point there just aren't enough touches to go around.

Marc Trestman’s offense is allowing multiple fantasy players to have value, but we’ll have to see how Josh McCown leads for the next few games. Thankfully last week against Washington he came right on and looked good. The target breakdown feels about right with Marshall slightly ahead of Jeffery. Forte is solidly around five per game and Bennett gets the biggest fluctuation.

Over the last three weeks Dez Bryant has 30 targets to Terrance William’s 19, Cole Beasley’s 15 and Jason Witten’s 13. Witten’s numbers have fallen hard while Beasley and Williams have been getting more work. I don’t think this is the end for Witten. He will have his games, but he has been inconsistent this season with just two games over 10 fantasy points.

Your target leaders for the Packers over the last three games are Jordy Nelson (24), Jarrett Boykin (22) and Eddie Lacy (12). That puts Jordy Nelson easily as the superior option, but James Jones should be returning soon. The question is, who will play the slot when he returns? In the last two games Myles White has been the slot receiver, but Jarrett Boykin is the preferred receiver by the coaching staff. All three of Jones, Nelson and Boykin have played in the slot before so they will most likely move them around and White will be the odd man out.

There have been three different quarterbacks starting for the Vikings this season and that kind of turnover, coupled with the poor play from each, has made it difficult for these numbers to paint much of a picture, especially when your best player by a bazillion is the running back. You can’t trust any Vikings’ receiver right now.

They just aren’t getting into the red zone enough for any receiver to have a good shot at consistent touchdowns. Adrian Peterson still can transcend the awfulness though.

Welcome to the NFC targets and touches for Week 9 of the NFL season. The AFC portion will be up tomorrow night, so mark your calendars.

This week since I had a little more time due to the byes I’ve added a few wrinkles to the target stats. I have all the targets for each player since Week 2, and then in parentheses I have the total targets for the year followed by another parenthesized number, which is the average targets per game played for that player. Then below that I have the Red Zone targets and touches for each player. The wrinkle I added there was instead of just targets I’m given you both targets and rushing attempts. That allows us to see how many times a player was given an opportunity to have the ball inside the opponent’s 20 yard line. So of course the running backs will have larger numbers there. And if anything is confusing hit me up on twitter or in the comments and I will happily explain.

Editor's Note: Rotoworld's partner FanDuel is hosting a one-week $300,000 Fantasy Football league for Week 9. It's $25 to join and first prize is $25,000. Starts Sunday at 1pm ET. Here's the link.

It’s odd to say, but the Cardinals didn’t need to do much after halftime because they had the game in hand, but before then Andre Ellington, Larry Fitzgerald and Michael Floyd all scored touchdowns. Carson Palmer only needed 13-of-18 completions for 172 yards and two touchdowns so there weren’t many targets and yards to go around for the receivers, especially the secondary receivers.

With Rashard Mendenhall out of the lineup with a toe injury, Andre Ellington went off for 154 rushing yards on just 15 carries. He had an 80 yard touchdown run, so of course his yards per carry is insane, but even if you take away that carry he had 76 yards on 14 carries, so the guy was getting it done on every carry. He was the lead back and was in on 63% of the snaps. He’s been around 45% over the last three games. His 17 total touches was his season high with 11 and 12 being his previous highs in Week 5 and 6.

The Cardinals haven’t been in the red zone all that often this season so we have a bit of a scatter shot look at their usage, but it does look like Ellington and Larry Fitzgerald have been getting the most looks down there of late and that’s the way it should be.

Harry Douglas had a huge 18-target game and most of those targets along with his production came in garbage-time. Drew Davis had a good garbage-time game catching five of seven targets for 77 yards and a touchdown and rookie Darius Johnson saw the second most targets with nine.

Steven Jackson did not look good in his first game back from his hamstring injury and I am being kind there. He saw 51 snaps to Jacquizz Rodgers’ 39. We’ll have to see if he looks better next week, but he has a tough game against the Panthers.

Tony Gonzalez was actually seeing more red zone looks before Roddy White and Julio Jones both went down. Now that he is the focus of the defense he is having a lot of trouble getting open and he sees even more defensive attention in the red zone.

The Panthers destroyed the Buccaneers last Thursday night without really breaking a sweat. Cam Newton has now run an average of 10 times per game over his last three games and the Panthers have won each game by an average of 19 points. Mike Shula has given Newton more designed runs and in turn has made their best player the focal point of the offense once again.

DeAngelo Williams leads the team in red zone touches, but inside the five-yard line Mike Tolbert leads with eight touches to two for Williams. With Johnathan Stewart coming back at some point there just aren't enough touches to go around.

Marc Trestman’s offense is allowing multiple fantasy players to have value, but we’ll have to see how Josh McCown leads for the next few games. Thankfully last week against Washington he came right on and looked good. The target breakdown feels about right with Marshall slightly ahead of Jeffery. Forte is solidly around five per game and Bennett gets the biggest fluctuation.

Over the last three weeks Dez Bryant has 30 targets to Terrance William’s 19, Cole Beasley’s 15 and Jason Witten’s 13. Witten’s numbers have fallen hard while Beasley and Williams have been getting more work. I don’t think this is the end for Witten. He will have his games, but he has been inconsistent this season with just two games over 10 fantasy points.

Your target leaders for the Packers over the last three games are Jordy Nelson (24), Jarrett Boykin (22) and Eddie Lacy (12). That puts Jordy Nelson easily as the superior option, but James Jones should be returning soon. The question is, who will play the slot when he returns? In the last two games Myles White has been the slot receiver, but Jarrett Boykin is the preferred receiver by the coaching staff. All three of Jones, Nelson and Boykin have played in the slot before so they will most likely move them around and White will be the odd man out.

There have been three different quarterbacks starting for the Vikings this season and that kind of turnover, coupled with the poor play from each, has made it difficult for these numbers to paint much of a picture, especially when your best player by a bazillion is the running back. You can’t trust any Vikings’ receiver right now.

Jimmy Graham was limited to 18 snaps, mostly inside the red zone and of course he catches two touchdowns. He had a big three targets and Drew Brees completed passes to 10 separate players. How two players caught two touchdowns each is pretty amazing in itself. Kenny Stills had just four targets and had two long touchdowns. That’s seven targets and four touchdowns between Stills and Graham. Efficiency thy name is Drew Brees.

I can’t say that Marques Colston is done, but I can say I don’t want him on my team anymore! It looked like Brees tried to get him a little more involved this week, but it just wasn’t working. If you aren’t scoring touchdowns on Brees’ targets I think he gets mad.

Darren Sproles didn’t have one rush, only saw four targets and his smallest percentage of snaps with 23%. He’s had a down season for sure, but the Saints are so inconsistent in who they showcase (unless it's Graham) that down games like this don’t keep me from wanting Sproles on my team.

There are 12 players on this list. That is too many! Well, for fantasy it is. I find it hard to feel good about any Saints player not named Brees or Graham and now even Graham’s worrisome with his torn up foot.

The Giants offense has hit the skids, but they’ve somehow been able to win their last two while Manning has averaged 223 yards passing and half a touchdown. He hasn’t thrown an interception over these last two games when he had thrown fifteen in the first six games. He has to be gun shy, which is probably hurting his and his receivers’ fantasy numbers.

Hakeem Nicks has had four red zone targets over the last two weeks and even though he was having trouble hanging onto the ball he’s had 42 targets over the last four games. He’s still very much part of the game plan.

Colin Kaepernick didn’t need to do much in London to squash the Jaguars, but it was good to see him running well. He only needed to complete 10 passes out of 16 attempts, but he did most of his damage on two touchdown runs.

Vernon Davis is the red zone target czar, but Frank Gore is the king of the rushing red zone. He had been losing some goal line work to Anthony Dixon, but that looks like it is officially over with Gore’s three goal line touchdowns over the last two weeks.

Golden Tate had five receptions for 93 yards and two touchdowns on Monday night while the rest of the team had five receptions for 42 yards and no touchdowns. Sidney Rice left this game with a torn ACL, but Percy Harvin could be back this week, which would be a huge boon for the wide receiver depleted team.

Monday night was the first game this season that Marshawn Lynch didn’t see the ball in the red zone. He also only totaled nine touches, by far his lowest number on the season. The Rams defense sacked Russell Wilson seven times and really played out of their minds at home after losing Sam Bradford for the season. We’ll chalk this one up to that.

Jared Cook hasn’t topped 45 yards or had a touchdown since his week one-fantasy explosion and he leads the Rams in targets. That shows you where this passing offense was even before Sam Bradford was injured.

As an aside, just to show you how horrible tight ends are this season, Cook has the 12th most tight end fantasy points. Of course over half of them came in Week 1.

The silver lining to all of this is the play of Zac Stacy. He went up against a Seattle team that was giving up 62 yards at 3.2 yards per carry to opposing running backs and rushed 26 times for 134 yards. Seattle knew they didn’t have to worry that much about Kellen Clemens, especially after intercepting him twice, but still here came Stacy.

Stacy was hurting on the Rams last drive, but came in as something of a decoy on the last play and lined up wide. Hopefully if he had been healthy they would have given him every chance to win that game at the goal line.

Last week wasn’t the best game for Robert Griffin and company, but there is no doubt who the main targets are, Pierre Garcon and Jordan Reed. I really like it when teams make it easy (I’m glaring at you New Orleans). After those two guys you can just move on to your next assignment.

Roy Helu once again saw more snaps than Alfred Morris, but didn’t get any red zone work while Morris did and scored a touchdown. Of course they abandoned the run for some reason, but I’m sure they had a really good reason for doing so.